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In the 2010s, the term telemedicine simply wasn’t part of the typical American’s lexicon. If you needed care, you visited a health care professional in person. That reality made the founding of UCHealth’s Virtual Health Center in 2016 seem ahead of its time. And it probably was—but not by much. “By 2017, we had four staffers per 24-hour period and three initial service lines,” says the center’s chief nursing officer, Amy Hassell. “Thanks, in part, to the pandemic, we now have 70 staffers every 12 hours and 16 lines of service in a 4,000-square-foot command center.”
But the Virtual Health Center isn’t just diagnosing things like COVID-19, which the center started doing through its urgent care service in early 2020 and ramped up massively during the pandemic. (The service went from doing 30 urgent care visits a day in January 2020 to 300 in February 2020 as COVID-19 fears flared. Today, it handles roughly 150.) The center has also been taking advantage of the pandemic-inspired confidence Coloradans—and local health care professionals—now say they have in virtual care to deploy new digital tools to help keep patients healthy at home and in the hospital.
Here, two other ways UCHealth has embraced the virtual revolution.
Remote Diabetic Care
Although the Virtual Health Center began standing up a service to monitor patients with diabetes in 2019, there was some skepticism about the idea of treating those patients from afar. That changed during the pandemic when UCHealth—and others—supplied patients with at-home wearables that monitored oxygen level, heart rate, and respiratory rate for those struggling to kick COVID-19. Wearables not only decreased the amount of time patients had to stay in the hospital, but they also lowered readmission rates. “People quickly realized we had the tools and the competencies to care for people remotely,” Hassell says. Today, clinicians can observe the continuous-glucose-monitoring devices patients with diabetes wear and adjust insulin dosing in real time.
Artificial Intelligence Monitoring
At the Virtual Health Center, teams of doctors and nurses scan computer screens that show them how patients who’ve been admitted to UCHealth hospitals are faring. These human eyes in the sky ensure that if an ICU patient’s vital signs change for the worse, an in-real-life clinician is notified and can hoof it to that bedside. But starting in May 2019, the center began adding another layer of safety: artificial intelligence. “We made huge progress with this tool during the pandemic, when it helped us see respiratory changes sooner so that we could intubate patients before they got too sick,” Hassell says. “Now our AI tool monitors 2,200 beds and continuously looks for issues like sepsis, which is often hard to detect until it’s blatant—and then it can be too late.”
By the Numbers
92.1%: Percentage of Colorado’s K–12 students who received all six required immunizations—or had a valid exemption—for the 2023-’24 school year. That’s down from a recent statewide high of 95 percent during the 2019-’20 school year. (Denver County 1’s compliance rate was only 86.6 percent; Colorado Springs 11 had one of the state’s lowest rates, at 67 percent.) Experts at nonprofit Immunize Colorado say the state’s slumping rates can be attributed to several factors, many related to the pandemic. “We see access issues—folks with barriers—but the pandemic highlighted vaccines,” says executive director Susan Lontine. “The misinformation and disinformation around vaccines created hesitancy that has lowered rates.”
2.6 million: Annual global deaths caused by measles before a vaccine became widespread. “To prevent the spread of certain diseases, like measles, 95 percent is the threshold for herd immunity,” Lontine says. “It’s our goal to get Colorado back to that level of compliance.”
